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A single desktop computer acting as a workstation for multiple simultaneous users in the same room using virtualisation - can it be done?!

Having purchased a new pc, and soon Windows 8 with Hyper-V, I will theoretically have the computing power and ports to drive 4 separate monitors. Having built this virtual network, 3 friends could visit, for some 4 player gaming, console style, with each user's input aimed at a different VM and hence monitor. The inputs may be game controllers or keyboard and mice combos, possibly both simultaneously(?!)

From searching the net I've not yet found an example of Windows 8 (or other OSs being used this way). Is there an insurmountable flaw in this plan? Would any third party tools be required? Thoughts? Comments? Examples?

Looking forward to your replies, thanks!

ExStackChanger
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Usually a VM will interact with hardware through drivers in the Parent Partition. In HyperV, the Parent Partition is a VM that has direct access to hardware. In contrast, a Child Partition accesses virtualised hardware. I/O messages are sent out over a bus, and processed by the Parent Partition. Other hypervisors follow this model, but use different names for the parent and child partitions. E.g. Xen refers to a Parent Partition as 'Dom0', and the Child Partition as 'DomU'.

In your case, you want to pass through access to dedicated hardware to each of the Child partitions VMs that your friends will use. Look to see if there is such a setting in the VM configuration. Note that you may run into performance problems, because you'll be deviding your computer's hardware across four virtual machines.

You don't see many examples online, because industry practice is to access the VM from a separate device. The device will access the VM via a remoting protocol. A simple example is RDP (Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol). A work grade version is ICA (Citrix's protocol). In contrast to RDP, ICA is useful for graphic-intense remote sessions.

Donal Lafferty
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  • Thanks Donal, the theory is helpful, I'm just hoping it will work in practise once this new PC arrives in a couple of days! Yes this setup won't be industry standard, but if it's practical there are surely lots of user-cases where this setup would be appealing. Consider a shared family computer fascilitating simultaneous web browsing and other non-resource-intensive tasks. Licensing is inevitably an issue, which is why I'll likely opt for Linux and primarily open source software. Steam on Linux is about to hit public Beta and will soon bring many multiplayer games to the platform... – ExStackChanger Oct 22 '12 at 09:53
  • HyperV does not run on Linux. You choices are XCP or KVM. XCP is the open source release of Citrix' XenServer. KVM is in the orbit of RedHat. Linux supports multiple user sessions out of the box. Redirect the display and input for a user's session to one of your four ports. No need to worry about a hypervisor. – Donal Lafferty Oct 22 '12 at 20:25
  • Thanks Donal, that's good to know regarding multiple user sessions on Linux. But I haven't been able to find the documentation for this working "out the box". Is this for all distributions? I'd like to use Ubuntu. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX looks right, but appears to require significant configuration (which is fine if there's no other way). I was describing running Linux as the child partition on top of Windows 8 running HyperV, rather than Linux on HyperV on Linux. But perhaps dual booting is the better option (I need W8 for work but want to use Linux more). – ExStackChanger Oct 24 '12 at 09:58
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ICA doesn't support multi headed RemoteFX which is what you'll need to make this feasible. There's no way you're going to be running 4 people on 1 machine with 4 keyboards though. Each of them is still going to have to have a remote connection in with a dedicated GPU. That means you're going to need at least 4 GPUs. You'll also need enough memory for the 5 machines (4 VMs plus the host) and enough processing power to run your game. So you'll still have 5 machines unless you've found a way to hook up 4 keyboards and 4 mouses plus the 4 monitors. You could use thin clients to achieve the affect, but I think you'll find they're just not geared toward the gamer market.

If you DO get this working, you should post specs cause it would be a very interesting idea for bring VDI to the gaming sector.

William M. Rawls
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  • Belated thanks for your input on this one. Unfortunately I was unable to get this working and soon found myself working on other projects... – ExStackChanger Feb 10 '15 at 16:47